Debian Project News - April 21st, 2008

Welcome to the first issue of the Debian Project News, the newsletter for
the Debian community! From now on we'll keep you informed about recent
events and interesting developments in and around the Debian Community on
a biweekly basis. But we could still need some help, so feel free to take
a look at our wiki.

New Debian Project Leader elected
After 12 years of working on Debian as a developer
Steve McIntyre was elected as the new Debian project leader.
Within short hours of taking the job Steve had his first
interview with iTWire
about his plans during his term. The interview
highlights Steve's hopes to improve communication between the core teams,
get Lenny out in the second half of 2008 and encourage greater
participation in the project.

When asked how Steve will know if he has done a good job this year he
replied, I'll know I've done a good job if Debian is in a better shape:
More efficient, more people having fun, more people working on the core
tasks that are needed. I want to see Lenny released inside our target
window. Beyond that, I'll just have to trust the judgement—my own and
those of my peers. I know that's a little wishy-washy, but it's not like
I can point to objective numbers like sales figures here... :-)

Surveying the Debian community
In the spirit of the bits from mails sent by various officers and
groups within Debian, Paul Wise prepares a
bits from the users of Debian
mail, in which he tries to summarize feedback he got
and gets from various users of the Debian operating system and will send it
to the development community around Debian. Users are asked to send him
via email what they are using Debian for, what gripes they see and
similar.

To get a full picture Paul is searching for volunteers who would like to
translate and forward his request to our non-English speaking mailing
lists and send answers translated back to him.

Release Update
Martin Zobel-Helas, a member of the release team, sent an
update about the next Debian release.
While there are still too many release critical bugs open there has been
great progress during the last bug squashing parties (BSP). So the current BSP
marathon will go on.

Martin also added some bits from different package teams and reports, that
GNOME 2.22 is on its way to the next stable release codenamed Lenny
while the KDE team stopped efforts on KDE 4.0.x and is instead focusing on
KDE 4.1 to be ready for Lenny.

Debian to participate again in Google's Summer of CodeErich Schubert reports,
that Debian will again participate in Google's
Summer of Code campaign allowing students to do paid work for free
software projects during the summer.

Debian got 13 slots granted, and he's sure that
Debian will be able to fill these slots
easily with very good applications working on a variety of topics.

Scientific study about Debian Project governance and social organization
How did a big non-commercial, non-paying community evolve into one that
produces some of the most respectable Operating Systems and application
packages available?

Debian makes progress regarding reliability
According to a recently published
study by the Institute for Advanced Professional Studies Yankee group
Debian made great improvements regarding reliability compared to the last
study from 2006. The average downtime of a Debian server has fallen by
41% while 24% of the respondents reported to have at least one Debian
server in their network compared to 15% who had it installed in the 2006
timeframe.

Debian feature requests wanted
For the upcoming Hackcontest in Switzerland Martin Krafft is looking for
more Debian related feature requests.
During the contest it's the task of
random teams to implement these features. Of course they'll need to be
working with the projects to accomplish their task, and so even if a team
should not win, Debian would profit.

Debian GNU/Linux FAQ to be improved with LennyJost van Baal reported
about his ongoing efforts to improve the official Debian GNU/Linux FAQ.
Since the versions shipped with Sarge and even Etch weren't in a good
shape (and partly outdated) he added new services and tools and rewrote
some parts of the FAQ. The updated FAQ will feature several translations
and will be shipped in a separate debian-faq package instead of being
part of the doc-debian package.

Debian Lenny to be shipped with qmail and djbdns in main
In the past Debian users who favoured using the popular software from Dan
J. Bernstein (like qmail or djbdns) needed to use packages shipping only
the source and compile these programmes themselves or use packages provided
by external services. This was due to a restrictive license used by him to
distribute his software. However, since Bernstein decided to change the
licence terms for his software, qmail and djbdns may be distributed in
Debian main and already efforts are going on to provide packages with the
next stable release.

Planet Debian as mailing list?
Jörg Jaspert wondered,
if Planet Debian, a service collecting Weblogs
of Debian Developers and contributors on one place, should be available
as a mailing list, too. Some people don't like the mixed private and
technical content available there, and having it as a mailing list might
be easier to sort interesting posts out.

Co-operative Breathes New Life into Old Machines with DebianBristol Wireless is a co-operative set
up to develop a free-to-access broadband intranet using radio, with the
emphasis on supplying ICT (Information and Communication Technologies)
that are relevant, permanent and affordable to communities that find
themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide. The group is
working together with Voscur
and Byteback Computing to
provide access to computers built on Debian to the people of Bristol.
Byteback provides the wiped machines to Bristol Wireless;
we install Debian Linux
on them and use the machines in our grant-funded projects
in deprived inner city areas.

Russell Coker blogedseveraltimes about the
status of Security Enhanced
Linux (SE Linux) support in Debian. He concludes that it isn't in bad
shape, but has still room for improvements.

After it has been often seemed that the ftp master team as well as the
Debian Account Managers (DAM) will to not be able to handle the workload,
Jörg Jaspert, who has already served as ftp assistant and secondary DAM
has been delegated
to a full ftp master and DAM by the former Debian
Project Leader Sam Hocevar.

Bjoern Boschman reports about a meeting taking
place in the Linuxhotel in Essen / Germany focusing on the 25th to 27th of
April about Groupware solution in Debian / not yet in Debian.

Want to continue reading DPN? Please help us create
this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who watch the
Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see our
HOWTO
contribute page to find out how to help. We're looking forward
to receiving your mail at
debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.